User Contributed Notes 8 notes

If you are using aliasing to import namespaced classes, take care that class_exists will not work using the short, aliased class name - apparently whenever a class name is used as string, only the full-namespace version can be used

If you recursively load several classes inside an autoload function (or mix manual loading and autoloading), be aware that class_exists() (as well as get_declared_classes()) does not know about classes previously loaded during the *current* autoload invocation.

Apparently, the internal list of declared classes is only updated after the autoload function is completed.

I'm running PHP 5.3.4 on Windows 7 and had some difficulty autoloading classes using class_exists(). In my case, when I checked for the class and it didn't exist, class_exists automatically threw a system Exception. I was also throwing my own exception resulting in an uncaught exception.